Mike Fahey

For some odd reason Wipeout 2048 lead designer Karl Jones and game director Stuart Tilley decided it was a good idea to explain in detail just how cool the futuristic PlayStation Vita racer was before they scrapped the terror-inducing Zombie secret game mode.

How can a futuristic racing game possibly add zombies? I know it sounds ridiculous, but the plans the folks at Sony's Liverpool Studios detail in a post on the PlayStation Blog today actually seem pretty freaking amazing. The rules of ZOMBIE were simple enough – survive the horror for as long as possible by avoiding or taking out the Zombie ships. You start in darkness, alone on the track. Then you hear them in the distance, the digital scream of their engines filling you with dread. They start to show up on your Zombie radar, a handful at first in hot pursuit and full of ominous darkness. Then they're on you, ramming you, destroying themselves if need be, but they're taking you with them. You can pick up Cannons and the occasional (but very rare) Quake to defend yourself, but it's only going to delay the inevitable – you will die. As time goes by, more and more Zombie ships appear, becoming more and more aggressive, until you are surrounded by a swarm of carbon-clad deliverers of Armageddon, and that's before a Zombie Mother-ship even shows up…shudder!This sounds positively glorious.

And it's gone.

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But maybe not forever. In the PlayStation Blog article explaining the lost mode, developers say the mode has been placed on the backburner for now, gone but not forgotten, a fading nightmare poised to return at any moment.